Boundless Together, Part 4

November 6, 2015

The last of four new commercials about UW–Madison will premiere this weekend during the Badger football game. Learn more about the research highlighted in the newest spot and watch the entire series below:

Health begins at home

How can medical professionals optimize patient care outside of a healthcare setting? Without monitoring, patients often have trouble adhering to a strict regimen or schedule. But keeping patients in a clinic or hospital isn’t always the answer.

Using virtual reality technology, the team will capture data and detailed images of the houses of people living with diabetes. By turning the images into immersive 3-D environments, the team will examine trends in objects and set-ups that may enhance or inhibit a person’s ability to remember specific health treatment tasks: taking medications, checking blood sugar levels, and other monitoring practices. Read more and get involved.

What’s all the buzz about?

“Busy as a bee” seems like just another phrase — until you spend time tracking each tiny insect’s flight pattern. Entomology graduate student Jeremy Hemberger is doing just that, and his work in Entomology Professor Claudio Gratton’s lab could help farmers sustainably optimize crop production.

Currently many farmers rent honeybees for their crops, but honeybees are a non-native species in Madison and many other parts of the world, which makes them more expensive to procure than the indigenous bumblebee. By tagging bumblebees with minuscule radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, Hemberger is learning how much time colonies spend foraging for food in various habitats in and around the Madison area.

Hemberger’s investigations into the intersection of ecology, conservation, and entomology are helping him develop models and tools for farmers to implement. Even slight adjustments create more bee-friendly environments, significantly improving the pollination potential — and the yield — of crops across Wisconsin and arable land everywhere. Read more and get involved.